There are a couple of significant downsides that temper my enthusiasm for the new Gear. First and foremost is the speed and intuitiveness of the user interface - or rather, the lack thereof. There's a tangible lag to anything you do with the Gear, while the swipe gestures are hard to figure out and do different things depending on where you are in the menus.

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Also important will be the Galaxy Gear's battery life. It does use the Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy standard to communicate, but at 315mAh its battery is decidedly small. Samsung promises "about a day" of endurance from the Gear, but by the end of our briefing with the company, the cameras on most of its demo units were refusing to turn on due to the watches running low on power.

I see no reason a smart watch is over $50 considering the kindles and android tablets available under $100. It doesn't need to do much and I don't need Internet on it. I don't need mp3's on it. Even with mp3's Bluetooth connected to an ear device at that is chicken scratch capability for an mp3 player. Any use of Bluetooth should be on demand and not continuous.

The display is critical. It needs to be readable in the sun. E-ink isn't a bad choice for basic watches. Smart watches will need more dynamic displays.

Smart watches will make sense when flexible OLED screens come out and we can use 16:9 or 16:10 resolutions. Big number displays with date and perhaps a notices task bar with symbols for things like new mail, low battery, alarms, sound (muted or not), alerts, etc. rather than being another email inbox, just a truncated cache delivered from another device like a phone or desktop. Wifi for directly connecting to the Internet is unnecessary, plus it's a battery killer as it continuously polls network connections.

It would be nice if it charged and connected to PCs using a standard phone micro USB cable. I can see issues with something like this in an intel shop...